


Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)

by johlyfams



Category: NCT (Band)
Genre: Broken Bones, Descriptive Injury, Doctor Kim Dongyoung | Doyoung, Doctor/Patient, First Meetings, M/M, Mentions of Blood/Injury, Soulmates
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-11-28
Updated: 2020-11-28
Packaged: 2021-03-09 23:40:18
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,664
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/27754729
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/johlyfams/pseuds/johlyfams
Summary: At the intersection of the phrases "break a leg" and "meet-cute," Dr. Kim Dongyoung finds his soulmate.
Relationships: Kim Dongyoung | Doyoung/Kim Jungwoo
Comments: 1
Kudos: 67
Collections: Challenge #3 — soulmates





	Bad Case of Loving You (Doctor, Doctor)

**Author's Note:**

> Quick warning before you read!!!!
> 
> In this fic, there are descriptions of broken bones, blood, and needles. Nothing too gory or explicitly detailed, but certainly mentioned and briefly described. If any of those things would make you uncomfortable to read about, please do not continue any further!! There are plenty of other fantastic Little Wonder fics to choose from :)
> 
> That said, if you would still like to continue reading, this fic is set in a universe in which one soulmate is able to feel the pain of their counterpart. Upon the first meeting, it is usually involuntary, but it can be controlled. 
> 
> I sincerely hope you enjoy it!! See you at the end :)

Donghyuck the Receptionist’s desk was a haven of solace for Dr. Kim Dongyoung when he needed a break, and, _god_ , he _really_ needed a break. Donghyuck had baby wipes, candy, energy drinks, and- best of all- he literally could not have cared any less for his job, making it a blessed work-free zone (Donghyuck was always a master at switching between tabs on his computer at superhuman speeds when his supervisor passed by. You could swear he was never playing Solitaire at all). It was where Dongoyung found himself at two o’clock in the morning, eight hours into his shift, scrubbing his face with a wipe. He was only half-listening to Donghyuck talk about his movie date with the pediatric nurse from upstairs, Jaemin (or "Nana," if you were Donghyuck), and how thrilled he was to feel pain shooting up his own arm when he’d punched Jaemin for stealing handfuls of popcorn from Donghyuck’s bowl. Though he was almost completely spaced out, he could still appreciate the adoration in the receptionist’s eyes while he waxed poetic about his newly-found soulmate. 

He was nursing a RedBull when a call came in through Donghyuck’s earpiece, making the receptionist’s face screw up in disgust. Dongyoung was trying and failing to glean information about the new intake through Donghyuck’s disdainful grunts of vague acquiescence when the receptionist spun in his rolling chair to face the doctor. 

“One coming from downtown. Intersectional car wreck.” Donghyuck’s brevity when it came to the topics of business was just another trait Dongyoung appreciated about the boy. 

He sighed, tipped back his head to slam the rest of the energy drink, and paged two nurses. 

Yukhei and Renjun appeared from somewhere in the grid, fresh latexes on all four of their hands. As per instruction, Renjun was holding a banana bag of IV fluids. The three of them and their matching eye bags marched to the sliding doors and waited for the scream of the siren to arrive.

From there, it was a whirlwind of carting the patient through the doors, getting the briefing from the E.M.T., running contact sheets, and finding a spot to shove the patient into the packed grid. He’d been almost completely ignoring the Ambulance Tech, but he did have the discernment to catch the words “Kim Jungwoo,” and “belonging collection bag” somewhere in the flurry. Once they’d hauled the patient on a sterile blue blanket from the gurney to the bed, the second mess began. The patient was a young adult, around Dongyoung’s age, male, and tall. His forehead was marred with gashes, all above his right eyebrow, all littered with tiny crystals of shattered glass, and all bleeding profusely.

Once Renjun’d snapped the banana bag into place on the IV hook above the boy’s head, he got to work on the gashes, mopping up the streams of vermillion with wads of gauze and cotton balls. The patient was bumped around and bruised up pretty much everywhere, his left arm was a mural of purples and greens and blues, but the injuries paled in comparison to his left leg.

Bent in every wrong direction imaginable, the boy’s leg was broken nearly in two. Not _just_ broken, but speared straight through the skin an inch below the inside of his knee. The gash through which the bone came was ragged and bleeding, the skin around it another painting of white and violet. 

For the first time, Dongyoung noticed that the boy, Jungwoo, was sobbing, sucking in heaving breaths between groans of pain. Dongyoung and Yukhei met eyes, an understanding passing between them as to what came next. 

Yukhei prepped, as quickly as his big floppy limbs would allow, a tray with stitching, dressing, and casting materials, rolling it over to be beside Dongyoung and Jungwoo.

Dongyoung kneeled at the end of the bed, over the damaged leg. Yukhei was next to him, at the ready with gauze. They shared a brief nod before Dongyoung looked up at Jungwoo.

“Once we get this set, we can cast it and get you some meds, sound good?” He spoke as calmly as possible to the boy, still crying and hissing out little short breaths. He nodded at Dongyoung. 

Satisfied, the doctor looked back down at the leg; it would be a short reset. With practiced ease, he rolled up the edges of his sleeves and made to grab the leg, one hand cupped under the knee, the other just under the break. _Here we go_ , he thought, fingers making contact.

He was half a word into telling Jungwoo to take a deep breath before he reeled backwards and off the hospital bed, shrieking in pain. 

There, on the ground, with no adrenaline or shock to buffer his body, he felt his left leg splitting, jagged edge of the bone tearing straight through the skin under the inside of his knee. Under his grey pant leg, nothing really was breaking. There wasn’t really a bone ripping through his skin. Visibly, no real ailments were plaguing the doctor, but the pain he felt was tangible and happening and happening _hard_ and Dongyoung couldn’t suck a breath in without a jolt of agony zapping down his spine and slamming into his leg with a sledgehammer. 

With wide eyes, Jungwoo stared down at the doctor from his place on the bed. Dongyoung forced his eyes open at the same time a tremor rattled his frame from the inside out; he glanced at the boy. There was a fair dose of fear in his wide eyes, leveled with surprise and just a pinch of _hello, soulmate_. Dongyoung truly couldn’t help his murderous glare, the unbearable smarting of his leg making him less than amicable. Jungwoo grimaced at the doctor, at least having the decency to look remorseful for seeing him in the same pain he knew better than anyone else in the room. 

Speaking of the others in the room, Yukhei and Renjun had all but stopped moving, shocked into stillness at the debacle. Renjun was poised with an antiseptic-glazed cotton gauze pad above Jungwoo’s face, Yukhei still ready with a bandage and wrap. Dongyoung groaned lowly in frustration. 

“You, halfwit,” he pointed at Renjun. “and you, bonehead,” he swiveled to Yukhei, “get a fucking move on,” he gritted out through clenched teeth, making to cradle his throbbing leg, but recoiling upon the splitting pain it earned him. As if slapped from a trance, Renjun held Jungwoo’s cheeks, careful of the scrapes, and began once again dabbing his face with the cotton pad, picking out pebbles of glass as he went along. Dongyoung winced at the sting of the antiseptic.

Yukhei resumed Dongyoung’s earlier positioning, bending over Jungwoo’s left leg. He reset it quickly, cupping his giant hands around the break and twisting until the bone clicked back into place. Still on the floor, Dongyoung gurgled out a noise, the pain choking any scream he might have wanted to make. Though it was still bordering on insufferable, Dongyoung could at least breathe properly with the leg set; at least, he _would_ be capable of breathing properly, if it wasn’t for the fact that his ribs most definitely felt cracked.

Looking up to gauge how far the crash cart (read: a .5 mg/mL syringe of morphine) was from his seat on the ground, he noted that Jungwoo wasn’t looking at him anymore. Though Dongyoung was shouldering the burden of the agony, Jungwoo was still crying. He barely contained the urge to glower at the boy, instead opting to crawl on his hands and right knee over to the crash cart and blindly reach around in the top drawer until he found the syringe with the red tab on the side.

At that point, he was acting not as Dongyoung the Doctor, with unending care and concern for his patient, but as Dongyoung the Man in Unimaginable Pain that Just so Happened to Have Access to Drugs. Hoisting himself up to stand with all of his weight on his right side, he hopped on one foot to Jungwoo’s side, where he leaned around Renjun to grab the IV line and the insertion module hanging from the side. He used his teeth to pull off the cap and sunk the tip of the needle into the insert, plunging the clear liquid through the tube and into Jungwoo’s hand. 

Immediately, Dongyoung’s knees buckled in relief. He sighed out loud and dropped his head, shoulders sagging. It only took a few breaths before he realized that, while morphine _did_ border on miraculous with how fast it worked, there was no way its effects could have been as instantaneous as they were. He looked down to see Jungwoo’s hand wrapped around his wrist. His big doe eyes were shiny with unshed tears. 

Jungwoo had taken back his pain. Dongyoung watched him start to shake like a leaf, jaw clenched. In his gaze, an apology made a home. He had never felt like such a raging asshole in all his years of life.

“I’m sorry. It was an accident,” the boy in the bed mumbled, voice raspy and trembling. Guilt hammered at Dongyoung’s conscious, and he couldn’t prevent the sigh that tumbled from his lips. By then, the gashes on his forehead had been cleaned and bandaged, Renjun having made quick work of the injuries once the shock from the earlier ordeal had worn off. Yukhei had the leg properly set, and was suturing the split in the skin with a curved needle and degradable stitch thread. The red and purple hue of the skin made Dongyoung wince.

He looked back down at Jungwoo. _Soulmate, huh?_

“I’m going to check your torso to see the damage to your ribs and if there’s any internal bleeding, okay?”

Jungwoo nodded.

Dongyoung lifted the boy’s shirt to see, sure enough, bruising on the left side of his ribcage. Thankfully, though, there was no discoloration on the softer part of his belly, which meant that, most likely, he wouldn’t be needing a trip to the O.R. that night. He repeated this to Renjun, holding the patient evaluation sheet and scratching notes here and there.

“I’ll just press around on your stomach, tell me immediately if something feels out of the ordinary, even if it’s just a little sore.”

He pushed two fingers lightly along the bare skin of Jungwoo’s belly, tracing little dotted circles around his vitals, stopping every so often to glance up at the boy. He was pink in the cheeks, but his expression was steady, looking at the doctor with a warm smile pulling at the edges of his lips, even though the skin between his eyebrows was pinched in pain. Dongyoung felt his heart melt like a popsicle in the sunshine.

He rested the flat of his palm right under Jungwoo’s sternum and closed his eyes, taking a deep breath and focusing on drawing the pain from the boy’s body into his own. He knew it’d worked when he felt the tiny pinpricks of a needle pulling at his leg, dull throbbing ache emanating from the center of it. Opening his eyes, he saw Jungwoo try to sit up; he could sense the rebuttal about to come. Pressing a little harder with his palm, he kept the boy laying down, and silenced him with a shake of his head. 

Without looking at him, Dongyoung asked, “Yukhei, are you about finished back there?” He rolled Jungwoo’s shirt back over his stomach, hand coming to rest again over his torso. He could feel Jungwoo’s breath under his palm.

“Last stitch,” the R.N. muttered, hunched over in focus. As if on cue, the nicks of the needle stopped their assault on his skin, and he felt the tug of the nurse tying off the final suture. When he winced just slightly, he felt Jungwoo’s palm slide up to cover his own, the one not taped to a tube. Looking up at the face that was still, somehow, handsome even though it was splotched red and puffy from tears, Dongyoung smiled as kindly as he could. When it was returned to him with plush lips and dimpled cheeks, he glanced away, embarrassed. 

Yukhei had taped a thick dressing around his work, and was beginning to wrap the leg in thin gauze. Dongyoung stopped him with a dramatic clearing of his throat and a, “I’ll take it from here.” The nurse glanced back and forth between the two, expression blank and somewhat confused, before he smiled, eyes sparkling rather mischievously. He must have suddenly remembered the events that’d transpired, because he made quite the show of standing and stretching, clapping a hand over Renjun’s shoulder, guiding the other nurse and his half-filled evaluation form out of the space, drawing the curtains behind them with a decidedly unsubtle wriggle of his eyebrows.

Again embarrassed, Dongyoung huffed, refusing to look up the bed at Jungwoo. Instead, he hobbled around to the rolling stool and drew it up under the boy’s left leg. As he was reaching for the cart with the casting materials, Jungwoo spoke.

“Does it hurt too badly?”

Dongyoung froze, then resumed. He picked up where Yukhei had left off, using a thin, soft sleeve of fabric to pull as gingerly as he could over the break. As he knocked just a little too hard over the skin, he hissed in pain.

“Not too bad.” He was only half joking. Jungwoo laughed anyway.

The two sat in not-quite-comfortable silence, Jungwoo as he waited for Dongyoung to finish casting his leg, Dongyoung as he waited for the morphine to fully kick in. His thoughts were in disarray as to how one was to talk to a person they’d just discovered they were meant to spend the rest of their life with. A greeting, he supposed, was the first step.

“I’m Kim Dongyoung.” 

“I know,” Jungwoo replied, tapping over his right breast, a mirror gesture to Dongyoung’s staff I.D. He shriveled in embarrassment, apparently delighting Jungwoo, who giggled sweetly. He wriggled his right toes, as if waving to get the doctor’s attention.

“Hey. No need to be so tense. I was just in a serious car accident, I don’t think there’s anything you could do that could be worse than that, yeah?”

“Oh, you’d be surprised.”

Again, Jungwoo burst into short laughs, putting Dongyoung in distress both physically (Jungwoo’s ribs were definitely broken, he should _not_ be laughing like that) and emotionally (because there was no way someone could look _that_ beautiful laughing under the Emergency Room’s sallow fluorescent lights).

“You’re funny. I like you, Kim Dongyoung.”

Dongyoung’s eyebrows shot up into his hairline, and his cheeks lit up like a stovetop. He scoffed, a funny, nervous little cough-laugh. The morphine had settled pretty well into Jungwoo’s system, and the aching in his leg was starting to subside, in little increments at a time. The sudden clarity the relief brought made Dongyoung feel a tad bit unprepared to process Jungwoo’s words and sudden shift from timid to coy; it was all he could do to smile anxiously.

“You think so? I don’t know if I’ve ever been called ‘funny’ before.” He stared down at the finished cast, under which he’d slipped a pillow. Jungwoo nudged him with a socked right foot.

“ _I_ just called you funny. You must be smart, too, being a doctor and all.”

Dongyoung shrugged.

“Dongyoung, since you're so smart, can you help me with something else? I’ve recently developed a sort of medical problem, and I think you can fix it? If you would.”

Dongyoung nodded, patting the shin of Jungwoo’s right leg.

“Of course, Jungwoo. What is it? I can refer you to a specialist if I’m unable to help.”

Jungwoo snickered.

“No, trust me, you’re definitely the only one that can fix it.”

His next words had Dongyoung fishing in his breast pocket for a pen to throw at him, pain altogether forgotten.

“Doctor, I’m just so terribly lovesick.”

**Author's Note:**

> Hello again!!!
> 
> Thank you so much for reading my Little Wonder. This is like the second fic I've written so I don't know if it's actually good or not haha. If you liked it, please drop a Kudos and enjoy the rest of the Little Wonder fics!! I've been reading them nonstop.
> 
> Thank you!! :)


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